When Symbols Backfire
Help me figure out something.
I sometimes build symbols to map ideas. Makes thinking easier. While I try to make them look decent, I care more about their usefulness as mental bookmarks. Function over form.
Just yesterday I’ve built a symbol that provoked such a visceral dislike in my team that it lost its usefulness for anyone else other than myself. Form frustrating function.
I want to understand why.
So, if you have two minutes, tell me about your reaction to this symbol before and after you read the short description of its assigned meaning (see below). Your comments would really help me. Thank you in advance. CC
The Symbol
Three letters B loosely inscribed in a circle loosely inscribed in a square
The Assigned Meaning
The symbol represents our connection to food; the dramatic relationship between man and dish, if you will :)
The three Bs in a triangle represent the functional trinity of food:
- Burn – food as fuel for action and its implications on human performance
- Build – food as a source of raw materials for constantly renewing a human body
- Bio – food as nutrition and habitat for a myriad of gut microorganisms that impact to a yet unknown degree our physical and mental health.
The circle, a perfect shape (it’s not a plate!) represents the experiential aspects of food: sensual, emotional, social and cultural elements that sometimes combine to give us a glimpse of the sublime.
The square (it’s not a table!) represents the structural aspects of food: political, economic, technical and logistical, governing the dynamics of the food journey from nature to us and back again. The interplay of enabling and limiting elements of the food ecosystem.
I created this symbol to help my team structure their thinking on the topic, using the least possible amount of effort. A simple mental bookmark they could just glance at when needed. But this time I got it wrong and met with vehement resistance. Why?
Your thoughts?
Owner, Chief Engineer at Altésis Ingegneria
1 年There are three major aspects for the unpleasantry of the symbol: 1. Broken gestalt: The thickness of the line work for the letters “B” is uneven, this breaks gestalt in a way that is uncanny for the eye because it’s too subtle to convey meaning but subconsciously noticeable and irritating. 2. Gaze limp: too many gaze paths do not give closure. For example trying to go from outside-in you break gaze path on the edges of the “B” and the diagonals of the triangle that want to force you to invert the gaze path and go outside-in. 3. Semantic failure: all but the “B”s have strong implicit semantics and are archetypical forms. This also breaks gestalt.